The arguments the Trump administration makes to justify dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development are, for the most part, just ill-informed wisecracks.

To call the United States’ $10 million contribution to support male circumcision in Mozambique ” appalling waste,” as President Donald Trump has done, reveals his ignorance of how the procedure helps prevent HIV infections. A grant to support better farming practices in Liberia is hardly “ridiculous” or “malicious.” Though it is true that opium poppy growers in Afghanistan have benefited from aid to improve irrigation, irrigation aid for poor Afghan farmers in general is not a bad way to alleviate poverty and promote economic development.

Plenty of good arguments can be made in favor of reforming foreign assistance — to make it more effective and efficient. But neither the president nor cost-cutter Elon Musk has articulated them. Their ridicule of specific aid programs only muddles the important debate over how to ensure that foreign aid serves its core mission: to improve the lives of billions living in the world’s most impoverished nations.

Foreign assistance is under siege in other countries as well. The British government recently announced it would cut its aid budget to 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product by 2027, from 0.5 percent this year and 0.7 percent in 2020. The European Union is reportedly planning to slash funding to the world’s least-developed countries by 35 percent. The French, Dutch and Belgians are also trimming their foreign aid.

Foreign assistance strategies everywhere are more than likely to include some inefficient or misconceived programs. For instance, people who otherwise support aid to other countries might disapprove of funding for a musical in Ireland or a comic book in Peru. But this is not the main motivation for the cuts to programs around the world.

The global turn against aid stems from more fundamental problems — starting with tight budgets in donor countries. Notably, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with China’s new assertiveness in Asia, is compelling countries across the Western world to spend more money on defense. Their foreign aid budgets offer a politically convenient source of funding.

Perhaps even more important are increasing calls for foreign aid to address an ever-expanding list of disparate, ambitious priorities, including helping poor countries adapt to climate change and ensuring “that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature,” one of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals that are supposed to be met by 2030.

According to U.N. estimates, the world faces a financing shortfall of $4 trillion annually to achieve these goals. This is a lot of money; it amounts to more than 6 percent of the total gross domestic product of the industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And many of the goals the money is meant to fund are not realistic. It isn’t possible to end extreme poverty by 2030, for instance. All children will not ” complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes “ by then. In 2022, nine percent of the world’s population still earned less than $2.15 a day, in 2017 dollars. In 2019, just under half of kids emerging from lower secondary school failed to demonstrate minimum proficiency in math.

Goals should always be ambitious, but if they are unattainable (or incomprehensible), they undercut support for effective efforts to improve the world. According to one estimate, U.S. foreign assistance programs save as many as 5.6 million lives per year: more than a quarter million in Nigeria, almost 125,000 in Pakistan and more than 60,000 in Bangladesh.

U.S.-sponsored antiretroviral therapies alone prevent more than 1.6 million people from dying of AIDS each year. American funding supports basic nutrition and access to safe drinking water in some of the poorest parts of the world. It keeps millions of children from being paralyzed by polio. These are worth keeping.

There are plenty of good ideas for how to make American aid more efficient. For example, the United States could save a lot of money if it didn’t require much of its food aid to be grown by American farmers and shipped across the world on American ships. Trimming the layers of regulation and oversight that require a cadre of expensive experts to ensure compliance would also cut costs.

Indeed, the broad global conversation about what foreign assistance can achieve needs to be better focused. But aid is not “ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats,” as the White House described it. Aid cannot be the solution for all of the problems that impoverished countries face. But it is a necessary building block for a better world.